New Life-Partner

For the better part of the year, I've been without my Sony Ericsson K850i. I'm okay with that. Allison and I dropped our feature phones and hopped on the Android bus, and we're both quite happy about it. While I had been well invested in hacking, mods, and generally wringing every last ounce of usability available from my K850, it was getting long in the tooth. It held up well with its compact form factor, great camera, and integrated posting to Blogger. I even found a great (free) bit of GPS software that I could use for geocaching and mapping my hikes.

We have slowly become aclimated to the Android way of life, checking the free app of the day from Amazon, and finding new tweaks to change the ways our phones do things. I've rooted both of our phones (I have an HTC Inspire, and she's got a Motorola Atrix) , and have flased some serious mods on mine.

This post was going to be a long review of all the features we love about our phones and our favorite apps, but after sitting on the first two paragraphs for about two weeks and not getting any further, I can see it needs to be broken up. Stay tuned for more. I'll be discussing the advantages of rooting. finding te right apps for what you want to do with your Android phone, and MAXIMIZING BATTERY LIFE.

This should be fun!

Get out there and go Geocaching!

While I've been aware of it for a long time, Geocaching has never felt like a very compelling thing to do, until we had to come up with a an on-the-spot birthday gift for my step-dad. He's been wanting to start geocaching for a long time, asking my sister to keep an eye out for a deal on one with the features they want for both car and trail use.

So while I was pondering what to get him for his birthday, I was reminded that I actually owned a (very old) stand alone GPS of my own, a Garmin GPS II. I got it out, replaced the batteries, fired it up, then sat it on the window sill while I finished shopping for a book to complete the perfect (and now less expensive) Geocaching starter gift. After finding the best book for the job (The Complete Idiot's Guide to Geocaching, 2nd Edition) and placing the order, I check out the GPS II and saw that it was indeed grabbing a few satellites. Ron was gonna be in business.

Somewhere in the process of looking for gifts, and trolling about the Geocaching website, we caught the fever as well. I was amazed to find that there are a few hundreds of caches just in our humble city of Lacey, Washington. I was still using my former phone at the time, which had proven its usefulness as a GPS previously, so I poked and prodded it a bit to see if it could be useful for geocaching.

It turned out to be very useful. As a member of AT&T Wireless' App Store Beta Site, I had some extra software already installed, in the form of Trimble Outdoors. Previous to this, I hadn't found a real use for it, but it made things VERY EASY to get started. Once you have registered your phone on Trimble's website, and registered your account on the Geocaching website, you can send any geocache's information directly to Trimble, and then download that information to your phone later. We used this method to find our first four caches. The only problem? This phone was not made to run any add-on software, having very little RAM, to the point that recieving a text message while doing anything else could be a major pain.

Replacing the Nokia phone was already in the works, but also left our geocaching adventures temporarily in the lurch because my replacement phone didn't have a GPS, and we weren't exactly prepared to shell out more money for whole other unit. Thanks to TrekBuddy, I have found a way to use my new phone (a Sony Ericsson K850i) with a bluetooth GPS reciever (a Holux M-1000)that we picked up for much less than a stand-alone unit would have cost. The end result is VERY simple to use, and costs very little to enjoy.

Installing Trekbuddy is a snap for most non-smartphones (if you have a smartphone, you probably have MANY OTHER apps to choose from). If you don't have a data plan, you can still download it to your computer and use your USB cable, memory card reader, or bluetooth to get it to your phone and install it. If you have a choice, install it to run from your memory card to facilitate the adding of LOC or GPX files.

Trekbuddy is actually very simple to use, but my problem with it was that it was too simple. It starts by showing you a map of the entire earth.  How was this going to turn into something useful? It really didn't. This map is just a graphical placeholder. If you want, there are a number of tools available for grabbing various maps of different sizes and types to show instead of the global atlas view. I grabbed a map of Lacey using GoogleMaps 2 TrekBuddy and dropped it in the \TrekBuddy\Maps folder on my phone's memory card to give me some street references. You don't have any zoom control, but TrekBuddy allows you to build atlases that include maps of varying detail for just this purpose. My take on this is that you really don't NEED that sort of detail for simple geocaching. Once you get close, you'll pretty much just need the Compass display to get you in the vicinity of your intended cache. This brings us to the question of how you get the geocache location information into Trekbuddy.

If you are too cheap to pay for Geocaching.com's premium membership (like me), you can't get access to the downloadable GPX files that contain all the handy information available on their website for each cache, but you can have the LOC files which contain the bare essentials. TrekBuddy can deal with either one of these. Simply find the cache(s) you want to look for on the Geocaching website, download the GPX or LOC files, then drop them in the \TrekBuddy\wpts folder on your phone.

Now that you have the basics, give it a try when you have some time and decent weather, and remember to keep an eye out for Muggles.

Blogged with the Flock Browser

Long Term Notes: Nokia 6650 Fold

After having used my free phone for a few more months, I thought I'd jot down a few more details on its state of being and what has and hasn't worked out.

The best thing about the newer smart phones is that once the manufacturer gets the hardware and software stable, a lot of the best things about your phone come from new and exciting ways to utilize its features through new software.  This has largely been the case with my 6650 Fold, so the majority of my discussion will be about the trials of various software solutions to my problems, some of which I never knew I had.

The only real complaints I've had about this phone have been about the button layout, which I discussed in my ealier post, and apparently haven't bothered doing anything more about since then.  I did purchase a USB cable, but haven't yet felt the need to actually attempt to make the changes so that I'm not always tapping the key to open the AT&T Navigator.  Maybe later...

One thing that has changed since I first wrote about my 6650 Fold, was the addition of an internet data plan.  This has allowed me to augment many of my favorite text-only services with new features.

The biggest shortcoming I've found with this phone is that it lacks a comfortable amount of RAM. There is a great web browser for S60 and WM phones called Skyfire, which I could only run after rebooting the phone or it would protest that there was not enough memory available.  SInce installing another helper application, I can't even run it after a reboot, but it was fun to use while I could.  If you have a data plan, and an S60 or Windows Mobile device, compare Skyfire to your packaged browser.  I'm willing to bet Skyfire will take you places you never thought possible from your phone.

Similar to Skyfire's problems with running short of memory, the same can be done with my built-in browser from time to time, so my browser of choice for this phone is Opera Mini. I use the full screen interface, almost exclusively, and it hardly ever malfunctions.  The Opera Link feature allows me to manage bookmarks and notes from my desktop, then synchronize with the browser on the phone later.  I only wish I could use it as my default browser.  Unfortunately, I have not found any way to do this yet.

Google has a full suite of applications for S60.  The ones I use are Search (accessible by pressing the C key from the idle screen, and now featuring voice recognition), Maps with Lattitude, Sync (SyncML or Exchange ActiveSync), and YouTube.  From Opera, I use Google Voice, Calendar, Reader, and iGoogle.

I would like to make special note of the Google Sync features for a couple of reasons.  The first is that being able to access your contacts and calendar features from your phone AND anywhere you can access the internet, is very, very handy.  The second? Something strange was happening when I was synchronizing both contact and calendar information that was causing the birthdays of my contacts to drift, making them all a few days younger!  Disabling the calendar sync has not helped, so I'm going back to the SyncML method.  Google? FIX IT!

The music application works well, and can be accessed with the phone either opened or closed, and there are many playback options to configure to your taste.  There isn't any 3.5mm headphone jack, so you're options are limited to using the somewhat proprietary 2.5mm headset jack or Bluetooth.  I'm using bluetooth, and it works great.  This phone does not appear to have any limitation as to what sort of audio is being listened to in order to pump audio through the bluetooth connection. One of my previous phones required a headset that supported A2DP in order to play back .wav or .mp3 files, or it would play throught the phone's speaker.  Nokia does not have that limitation.

One of the features not included with this phone is picture GeoTagging, but it can be added by installing Nokia's Location Tagger software.  This is built into many of their phones, but is not included with the 6650 fold, probably due to RAM constraints again. It loads up when you start the phone, grabs your location with the GPS, goes to sleep, then wakes up the GPS when you launch the camera application.  Any pictures taken after the GPS has reaquired your location are geotagged.

In closing, I have to say again that while there are a lot of limitations to what this phone comes with, there is plenty it can do if you know where to look, and while there are many signs saying Symbian might not have much longer to live in this world, the fact is that it allows for plenty of added functionality for a very cheap (and fairly durable) flip-phone. Thank you, Nokia 6650 Fold, for being a great temporary measure.

Blogged with the Flock Browser

A new toy in my pocket

I got a new phone. Not one of the ones I've been aspiring to reacquire from Sony Ericsson, but an upgrade nonetheless. I was going to hold out and just purchase an SE model this summer, but was tired of being frustrated by the Samsung Blackjack I had been using. The Blackjack has lots of features, but is overall very unsatisfying.

My new phone is a Nokia 6650 Fold (not anywhere close to the original 6650), from AT&T Wireless, which is different yet than the regular 6650 Fold you might find from other networks or independent dealers. AT&T wanted to make it a little different, to show off their navigation software and PTT features on this phone, so it has a few more buttons to mess with.

Part of my agenda with this phone is to undo some of the crap AT&T has done to make it "theirs," and make it a little more my own. Symbian is a new beast to me, so I'll be learning for a long time to come, but I am already enjoying some of the benefits of this phone.

Bluetooth: I can conclusively say that bluetooth reception and transmission on the Blackjack sucks. I went back to trying out my Sony Ericsson over-the-ear headset for this phone, because it is the best sounding, least intrusive, and most comfortable headset I have. This headset had a problem with the microphone not always working with the Blackjack, and I still need to test this out. The other problem I saw with this headset was in being able to keep it connected to the phone. This is no longer a problem with the 6650 (hooray!!). The NEW feature with the Nokia is that it pings the headset when a message is received, so I can set the phone to complete silence and tell from the headset when something has happened.

Flexibility: The phone's menu system can be presented in a number of ways, and I still haven't decided what I like more. The addition of touch sensitive buttons for the external display allows for some nice features. I can scan text messages without opening it up, and have access to the calendar, stopwatch, timer, camera, and music player!

The funny thing I see with this phone is that it is running what is normally recognized as a smart phone operating system, but because it isn't from Microsoft or Apple, and only has a numeric keypad, it has been given access to the cheaper data plan from AT&T. I love that.

What I'll be doing next is adding some applications to use the GPS built into it. The phone comes with the AT&T Navigator software built in, but that costs money for the service and data (separately). There is navigation software available that can be used with map data stored on the memory card, which is preferable right now, as I only want to be able to see how far I'm walking at lunch, or whenever else. I would also like to see if it has any geotagging options.

Blogged with the Flock Browser